UFT President Michael Mulgrew isn’t afraid to pivot

Michael Mulgrew sounds like an idealistic liberal who wants everybody to realize the American dream; he just wants to make sure he’s the one who gets his members there first. The 59-year-old former high school teacher leads the United Federation of Teachers, whose nearly 200,000 members include New York City public school teachers, school nurses and other school workers.

“We are people who chose to work in a profession where we want to change the world, most of us by helping kids or by being in health care – that’s the two biggest buckets we have,” Mulgrew said recently during a wide-ranging interview with City & State. “You don’t do that work unless you have a calling because you care about our world.”

Since becoming president of the UFT in 2009, Mulgrew has become a leading figure within the city and state’s labor movement. He is currently the vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, an executive board member of New York State United Teachers, a member of both the executive council of the New York State AFL-CIO and the executive board of the New York City Central Labor Council, as well as executive vice chair of the city’s Municipal Labor Committee.

With predecessors like former UFT Presidents Albert Shanker and Randi Weingarten, both of whom went on to run the American Federation of Teachers, the leadership bar for Mulgrew has been set pretty high.

Michael Mulgrew has a kind of swagger, a self-confidence that telegraphs he knows where he wants to go and has a plan to get there, but he’s not apt to broadcast it. That ensures people will pay closer attention. In his decade and a half atop one of the city’s most influential public unions, Mulgrew has displayed shrewd political instincts and a willingness to pivot to ensure that he’s positioned between his members’ interests and external political demands. His political flexibility has enabled him to almost always come out on top when it comes to the most contentious issues facing his members, from the pitched battle between retirees and the city over Medicare Advantage plans to the ongoing debate over congestion pricing.

A new contract

Mulgrew spent a dozen years as a teacher at William E. Grady High School in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, before being named chief operating officer of the UFT in 2008. A year later, he succeeded Weingarten as the UFT president. The UFT president’s main job is negotiating a union contract with New York City on behalf of his members. During his tenure, Mulgrew has settled three contracts that have significantly improved the pay for teachers.

When Mulgrew took over leadership of the UFT in 2009, he found that Mayor Michael Bloomberg was resistant to negotiate municipal contracts. It wasn’t until 2014, once Mayor Bill de Blasio was in office, that Mulgrew was able to win a deal for his members. That contract included full retroactive pay with an 18% increase over nine years. Shortly before that contract expired, Mulgrew negotiated another deal with de Blasio that included raises of 7.7% over three and a half years.

That contract lasted through 2022, and Mulgrew reached a new pact with Mayor Eric Adams last year that included significant gains. The new contract, which was retroactive to 2022 and will last through 2027, included an accelerated salary schedule with a one-time ratification bonus of $3,000, a new yearly retention bonus that started in May of this year and annual salary bumps starting at 3% in the first three years, growing to 3.25% in the fourth year and 3.5% starting in September 2026. Under the old contract, it would take a new teacher 15 years to attain a $100,000 annual salary; now, it will take just eight years.

Mulgrew’s deal with Adams came amid a national crisis in teacher retention in the aftermath of the pandemic. According to a survey last year done by the National Education Association, 55% of teachers in a national survey said that they were thinking of leaving their profession.

That same year, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli reported that 2.5% of the city’s 77,160 teachers had left between June 2020 and June 2021, in the first year of the pandemic. Close to 3,700 teachers’ employment status was upended over the city’s mandatory vaccination policy.

Mulgrew now makes more than $300,000 per year leading the 200,000-member union. He knows how to “go to war” with a recalcitrant mayor (see the Bloomberg years) and how to make peace to close the big contract deal (see the de Blasio years.)

Medicare Advantage

In June, it seemed that Mulgrew was gearing up to take on Adams, after the UFT abruptly withdrew from the city’s controversial plan to force 250,000 retired civil servants off of their Medicare and onto Medicare Advantage and walked away from ongoing negotiations over the health care coverage for the city’s active workforce. It was a one-two punch that highlighted the hostility between the union and City Hall.

“It has become apparent that this administration is unwilling to continue this work in good faith,” Mulgrew wrote in a letter to Harry Nespoli, chair of the Municipal Labor Committee. “The city has delayed our current in-service and pre-Medicare retiree health care negotiations for months, and we no longer feel that it is in the interest of our members to be part of that process. This administration has proven to be more interested in cutting its costs than honestly working with us to provide high-quality health care costs to city workers.”

While the letter took aim at Adams, there was collateral damage for the rest of the Municipal Labor Committee. That group represents the city’s public unions – including heavy hitters like District Council 37 and Teamsters Local 237 – and many of them had taken considerable heat for going along with the controversial Medicare Advantage plan.

The Medicare Advantage controversy has its roots in a 2018 agreement between the municipal unions and the de Blasio administration to find ways to reduce the city’s health care costs. In 2021, the Municipal Labor Committee and de Blasio announced a plan to move retirees onto privately managed Medicare Advantage plans in order to help the city realize some $600 million in savings.

Mulgrew was one of the most outspoken supporters of the Medicare Advantage plan, until he wasn’t – which put other public sector unions in an awkward position. According to two union sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss internal deliberations, Mulgrew’s abrupt about-face rankled fellow members of the Municipal Labor Committee.

“This shocked everybody,” one Municipal Labor Committee source told City & State. “He makes the announcement on a weekend that he’s pulling out – that he’s no longer supporting anything. So, then the discussion starts to happen at the MLC like – wait a minute – (Mulgrew) is the guy that’s been pushing this. Now he’s not for it. Wait a minute. We took a vote. We can’t just pull out.”

Listening to retirees

What changed Mulgrew’s mind was a vote taken by retired teachers, a key component of the UFT. Although Mulgrew was a strong supporter of the Medicare Advantage switch, which would save money by pushing retired municipal workers onto privately managed health plans, many retired workers were not.

Mulgrew and the top Municipal Leadership Committee leaders underestimated just how fierce the opposition would be to shifting New York City’s 250,000 retired civil servants from Medicare to privately managed Medicare Advantage plans. The NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees, led by retired FDNY emergency medical technician Marianne Pizzitola, raised sufficient funds to bring lawsuits to stop the planned shift and were largely successful in the courts.

In June, Mulgrew lost a key proxy battle when the Retiree Advocate slate – which campaigned in opposition to the Medicare Advantage plan – defeated members of Mulgrew’s Unity Caucus in an election for leadership of UFT’s retiree chapter, 17,226 votes to 10,114 votes.

“Mulgrew had been impervious to requests that he reverse his position on Medicare Advantage, but once he saw the handwriting on the wall, he jumped off the Titanic,” said Joe Wilson, an author and labor historian. “He perceived correctly that his interests were more aligned with internal union politics than with any agreement he made with the city or with the other municipal unions.”

After Mulgrew walked away from the Medicare Advantage plan, Harry Nespoli, the chair of the Municipal Leadership Committee and president of sanitation union Teamsters Local 831, credited Mulgrew with “listening to his members” and said that couldn’t “tell presidents how to run their unions.”

Henry Garrido, president of the 120,000-strong DC 37 union, was more somber about Mulgrew’s decision. “The very stark fact remains that health care for city workers and retirees needs to be funded, and absent a viable solution such as the one underway, those premium-free benefits are on the line,” he said in a statement.

Mulgrew told City & State that his decision to pull out of the Medicare Advantage strategy and walk away from the negotiations over active employees was the culmination of over a decade of efforts at cost containment, including encouraging his members to find a primary doctor or avoid unnecessary emergency room visits.

“This all goes back to the biggest crisis I feel that we are all facing – the health care crisis and its affordability and that goes for everything in health care between drug costs, which does get some play, the hospitals, the insurance companies, all that should be much more prominent discussion nationally,” Mulgrew said. “All that we know is that they are making billions of dollars while claiming it’s the other side that’s no good. The insurance companies blame the hospitals and the medical providers and the hospital and the medical providers blame the insurance companies. All that we know is the costs are skyrocketing out of control.”

After being criticized by retirees for not protecting their access to Medicare, Mulgrew has now voiced strong support for federal legislation to defend Medicare from Republican attempts to gut it. “We have to get aggressive. We have to stop waiting for the federal government and our elected officials to feel comfortable to move on something and we’ve got to push it now,” Mulgrew said. “We have to start with our retirees because there’s been three serious attempts to roll back Social Security and Medicare by Republicans.”

Congestion pricing

Ever politically nimble, Mulgrew is more than willing to work with Republicans when it suits him. Earlier this year, the union leader gained leverage by helping to bring together an improbable coalition that united organized labor with Republican Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella to oppose congestion pricing. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s implementation of congestion pricing, which is mandated by state law, would have raised $1 billion annually by charging $15 per car and $24 to $36 per truck to enter Midtown and lower Manhattan.

Mulgrew joined with Fossella to file a federal lawsuit against the MTA, alleging that the congestion pricing plan was “a regressive and discriminatory pricing scheme that violates Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.” When the lawsuit was filed, Mulgrew criticized the MTA plan, arguing that “it will only succeed in moving traffic and pollution from one part of the city to another, even as it increases the economic burden on working- and middle-class communities.”

Mulgrew told City & State that he was offended by congestion pricing because “you can’t have a plan that puts more on poor people and takes that pollution away from rich people. It’s not diminishing pollution and the worst part of it is it was going to be the middle income working class that would be the ones paying to make this happen. So, it was just obscene to me.”

Nespoli, the chair of the Municipal Labor Committee, said the congestion pricing plan would “destroy” the household finances of the city’s essential and emergency service workers who are required to commute into Manhattan south of 60th Street. “We need people thinking the right way. We need people to step back and take a look at this,” Nespoli said. Over three-quarters of the more than 100 unions that belong to the Municipal Labor Committee voted to join in the UFT and Fossella’s lawsuit, which also received support from three civil rights organizations and 18 elected officials representing the outer boroughs and suburbs.

Mulgrew’s gambit was effective, as Gov. Kathy Hochul ultimately pulled the plug on congestion pricing just before it was set to begin. That decision outraged politicians and advocates who accused the governor of defunding the MTA, but Mulgrew has no regrets about his opposition to congestion pricing. He has expressed support for alternative means of funding the MTA, including the restoration of the state’s tax on stock transfers.

Mayoral politics

The UFT does not have a great record when it comes to mayoral endorsements in Democratic primaries. In 2013, it backed former city Comptroller Bill Thompson, who lost to de Blasio, and in 2021, it was an early supporter of former city Comptroller Scott Stringer, who ended up losing to Adams.

Municipal labor unions have traditionally endorsed incumbent mayors for reelection, but Adams has low approval ratings and faces a growing number of primary challengers – including Stringer – and it remains possible that UFT will abandon the embattled mayor.

When it comes to who the union backs in elections, Mulgrew said his criteria is pragmatic and linked to advancing the fortunes of his rank-and-file members, period. “Our job is to endorse people that we have vetted and we know are in the best interest of our profession – in the best interest of us being able to function as a union – in the best interest of us being able to maintain your ability to have a livelihood to take care of yourself and your family,” he said.

Although Mulgrew and Adams have certainly clashed, the mayor was careful to avoid open war with the UFT. Asked about Mulgrew’s sharp criticisms of his administration, Adams tried to contain any potential fallout by distinguishing the nasty fight over union members’ health care plans from the administration’s successful negotiations over a new union contract.

“Michael has a job to do for his members,” Adams said, just days after Mulgrew criticized his administration for not acting in “good faith” during health care negotiations. “I’m sure he would tell you how well we settled the UFT contracts, how well we did for teachers when others were not,” Adams said. “The goal in this business is you have to separate individual issues from the overall mission. That’s how he feels about the health care plan, the Medicare Advantage plan. That’s that. That is not how he feels about the role he played in assisting us to get mayoral control, how we’re doing in building new schools. I think people personalize the response on individual issues. He feels that way on that issue.”

For his part, Mulgrew denied that his decision to walk away from health care negotiations with the Adams administration was a sign that the union would endorse Adams for reelection.

“Politics shifts quite a lot,” he said. “We’ll see how the mayor’s race shakes out.